Fairest of Them All Read online

  She surveyed herself critically in the hand mirror, noting with dismay that its glass had cracked in the fall. A thin schism divided her ravaged reflection into two halves.

  Austyn’s shadow loomed once more against the tent wall. Holly laid aside the mirror, defiantly dabbed a drop of myrrh oil in the hollow of her throat, and called out with calculated malice, “Coming, my lord.”

  Austyn struggled not to recoil as his bride swept out of the tent. The bright morning sunlight showed her even less mercy than the mellow afternoon sun. Pity tempered his irritation at being kept waiting. It must be a terrible blow to her that the eternity she’d spent preening had yielded no more pleasing results.

  He was mystified to note that, on the contrary, she looked excessively pleased with herself. The smile she shot him was almost coy. “Did you make mention of food, sir? I’m ravenous. I feared perhaps you were trying to starve me.”

  “Of course not. ’Twas simply so late when we halted …” Austyn trailed off, already regretting his confession of the previous night. He’d been reluctant to divulge his secret, but feared it might wound her tender feelings if she believed her appearance alone had dissuaded him from bedding her.

  She tilted her pert little snout in the air, sniffing eagerly at the aroma of roasting meat. “ ’Tis never too late to indulge the appetite, sir. Nor too early.” Hefting her skirts to reveal a pair of slender ankles that should have been too delicate to support her bulk, she trotted briskly in the direction of the food.

  Austyn studied the saucy sway of her hips, bedeviled by a sense of unease. He would have almost sworn that unsightly bulge was on her right flank yesterday. He was distracted from that thought by the twitching of his nostrils. ’Twas not the scent of roasting hare that tantalized them, but a more elusive fragrance ribboning through the air. He shook his head, dismissing the absurdity. It seemed his wits had all but deserted him since the day he had first heard the name of Tewksbury.

  Austyn was to rue that day anew as he and Carey leaned against opposing trees, glumly watching his bride pack away her third cold meat pie. She sat on a low stump, her knees spread wide so that her skirt might catch any morsel that escaped her avid attentions. Thus far it had gathered only the sparsest of crumbs. Austyn was beginning to understand how she’d managed to achieve such an impressive girth on such a delicate frame.

  The hare Carey had shot and roasted had long since been reduced to a pathetic skeleton. Austyn tilted his head in reluctant fascination as he watched her eat He was loathe to admit it, but her gluttony did possess a certain sensual elegance. She ate with the decadent abandon of someone either blissfully oblivious or blatantly scornful of the critical scrutiny of others. His gaze was drawn to her puckered lips as she sucked the grease from each finger in turn with mesmerizing thoroughness.

  “Good God,” Carey said, snapping him out of his reverie as she delved face first into another pie. “I’ve never seen such piggery. She eats like a horse.”

  “I feared she was going to eat my horse. ’Tis fortunate we shall reach Caer Gavenmore by nightfall or we’d all starve.”

  “Or be eaten,” Carey muttered darkly.

  The possibility of meeting such a fate seemed less unkind to Austyn once their journey got under way and the hours in his wife’s company crawled past. After traveling only a few leagues, Austyn began to suspect that a vindictive Booka had wiggled its way into the tent during the night and replaced his long-suffering bride of yesterday with an insufferable harpy.

  When she wasn’t whining, she was complaining about the unseasonal heat. When she wasn’t complaining about the heat, she was demanding they stop for another meal. Or a drink of water from a fresh running stream. Or a moment of privacy in the bushes. When she wasn’t making impossible demands, she was bemoaning the godforsaken ruts in the narrow path. Or the bumpiness of the worsening terrain. Or the increasing bleakness of the Welsh landscape.

  Her incessant bleating not only was setting Austyn’s teeth on edge but was kindling everyone else’s temper as well. When he inadvertently called her “Ivy” after her third rendition of “How much farther have we to travel?” the entire party, including her mousy nurse, swiveled in their saddles and shrieked “Holly!” at him.

  He had subsided, scowling fiercely. His own comfort in the saddle was severely impeded by the perpetual state of arousal provoked by the hint of myrrh that still haunted the breeze. He had thought Rhiannon banished from his life, but perhaps the vindictive witch had simply devised a more diabolical means of torture.

  As they wended their way up a steep, rocky hillside, Carey drew his mount alongside Austyn’s. “Wretched little tyrant, isn’t she? ’Tis no mystery now why her father sought to rid himself of her company. You should ride straight back to Tewksbury and demand more gold.”

  Austyn forced a shrug that was far more light-hearted than he felt. He was beginning to fear he’d made a terrible mistake. “The shaping of character is a delicate task. Her father probably coddled her every whim to console her for the curse of her looks.”

  Carey shot a dark glance over his shoulder. “ ’Tis a pity he got naught for his efforts but an ugly brat.”

  “Perhaps maturity will mellow her temper.”

  “If you don’t strangle her first.” All it took was a wry flick of Austyn’s gaze to make Carey blanch. “Oh, Christ, Austyn, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Austyn smiled to reassure him. “Don’t apologize. As well you know, it takes more than a bit of nagging to tempt a Gavenmore to murder.”

  “Sir Austyn? Sir Austyn, I say, are we nearing the end of our journey yet? ’Twill be nigh on to noontide soon and I’m growing quite faint with hunger.”

  At the sound of the querulous voice, Austyn’s smile tightened to a wince. “Mayhaps I spoke prematurely …”

  Holly had never been so miserable in her entire life.

  The mountainous terrain made any semblance of comfort impossible. Her persistent squirming only succeeded in wadding up a lump of cloth that seemed to take malicious pleasure in poking her in the spine with each torturous clop of the horse’s hooves. She had obediently kept her face bared to the sun as the hours passed; now each lick of the afternoon breeze stung her cheeks with tongues of flame.

  Her gluttonous attempts to plump herself up had done nothing but bloat her belly and make her drowsy. Yet the food had failed to sate the empty ache in the pit of her stomach, and with her nerves plucked like lyre strings, she found sleep to be even more unattainable than comfort.

  She had spent half the journey poised on tenterhooks, expecting a horde of murderous Welshmen to spring out from behind every knoll, and the other half nursing the even grimmer suspicion that Gavenmore possessed no such reinforcements. That her papa had surrendered her without so much as a whimper for naught.

  No one had dared speak to her since Nathanael had urged his donkey to her side shortly after the noontide meal. “Splendid strategy, my child,” he had murmured up at her, his long legs flopping over the animal’s flanks. “A man finds nothing so repugnant as a shrewish wife.”

  Holly had fixed him with her haughtiest glare. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

  Try as she might, she could not keep her gaze off the broad, forbidding planes of her husband’s back. He had been the very soul of patience with her, yet she feared his tolerance would not last. Especially not if he discovered her deception. As they passed beneath a gnarled arch of branches, the portal to a forested slope, Elspeth’s dire prophecy of being murdered and left to rot beneath a blanket of lichen seemed less absurd than it had in the rolling meadows of England.

  Holly’s gaze darted from tree to tree, seeking escape from her own sinister musings. The Welsh landscape was as foreign as the circumstances she’d unwittingly thrust upon herself. Ancient oaks towered over their heads, bearing little resemblance to the sprightly birches and elms of Tewksbury. Their ponderous canopy faded the sun’s rays, creating an eternal twilight of damp
shadows and ferny hollows. A carpet of moss blunted their horses’ hoofsteps to a sibilant hush.

  Holly’s imagination rapidly succumbed to the forest’s dark enchantment. Instead of the throaty warble of some unknown bird, she heard the sly giggling of faeries mocking her predicament. The musical cadences of a waterfall tumbling over stone became the piping of some goatish Pan luring a maiden to her ruin. The twisted trunks of blackthorn and alder leered at her like faces frozen in anguish, the captive spirits of other travelers foolish enough to profane this hallowed forest.

  Her panic surged as the slope steepened and she realized how far she’d fallen behind the others. They were already crossing the murky cauldron of a brook that lay in their path. Wishing she’d had the foresight to sneak her leg over the mare’s neck while they were still on level ground, Holly hastened her horse forward, tangling her hands in both reins and mane to keep her tenuous seat.

  As the mare splashed into the swirling water, its front legs disappearing from hoof to fetlock, a gauzy thread brushed Holly’s naked nape. Terror seized her. Icy gooseflesh erupted on her skin. She dropped the reins and twisted in the saddle, screaming and batting wildly at her head and shoulders.

  The startled horse reared, dumping her rump first into the chill water. Holly could not have said if it was the jarring thump of her landing or the icy shock of the water rushing up her skirt that restored her to sanity. One moment she was screaming hysterically; the next she was gaping dumbly up at the innocuous twig she had believed to be the skittering claw of some venomous spider and the willow leaf she had feared was its lair.

  The expectant silence swelled. Holly turned her head to find the others frozen on the slope, gawking at her as if she’d fallen not off a horse, but out of the sky.

  She might have overlooked the grin Carey attempted to hide behind his discreetly raised gauntlet. She might have tolerated Nathanael’s snickering or even the fact that Elspeth—her loyal, beloved Elspeth—had compressed her lips so hard she was turning a mottled shade of red from lack of air. What she could not endure was the absence of both amusement and reproach in her husband’s eyes. They reflected only a wary pity that made her feel even more foolish than she was.

  Her ragged fingernails dug into the muddy stream bottom as homesickness crashed over her in waves of misery. She wanted nothing more than to be nestled back in her bed at Tewksbury. She wanted her hair, her eyelashes, her flawless complexion. She wanted her papa. And most defeating of all, she wanted her mama. It was a primal yearning, subdued for so many years that she had forgotten its power to close her throat and bring tears welling to her eyes.

  As she suppressed a crude sniffle, waiting for that first tear to brim over and spill down her cheek like a priceless pearl, it occurred to her that she no longer need practice the art of weeping prettily. There were no suitors poised to dry her tears, no tutor who would dare chasten her for reddening her nose, no papa to chide her for giving free and selfish reign to her un-happiness.

  With that liberating realization, Holly Felicia Bernadette de Chastel, lady of Gavenmore and the fairest woman in all of England, tipped back her head and let loose with an earsplitting wail.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Good Lord, man, can’t you make her stop?”

  Even if Austyn had a reply for Carey’s plea, which he did not, Carey would have had to pry his hands away from his ears to hear it. Austyn and his companions sat paralyzed on their mounts, gaping at his bride with varying degrees of horror and disbelief. The horses shifted restlessly, desperate to bolt.

  Austyn could hardly blame them. He was tempted to do the same. He had entertained the naive hope that his new wife might be a helpmeet, someone who would share his cares and responsibilities, thereby lessening them. But it seemed he had only earned himself another burden. And a deafening one at that.

  She had thrown back her head and was bawling like a newborn calf. Fat tears streamed down her face. Austyn would have wagered it impossible that human skin could flush brighter than her sunburned cheeks, yet her nose had deepened to a ripe cherry red. She resembled nothing so much as a homely little troll having one hell of a temper tantrum.

  Her childish display should have enraged him, but Austyn could not dismiss the plaintive note in her wailing. ’Twas as if she’d hoarded a lifetime of misery for just such a moment

  “For bloody’s sake, Austyn, do something,” Carey pleaded. “Comfort her. Offer her a kerchief. Go pat her on the … on the”—he fumbled for an appropriate body part—“shoulder.”

  Austyn was more than ready to take action. He swung one leg over his horse, dismounting with unmistakable resolve. “Take the others and ride ahead. Don’t turn back no matter what you may hear.”

  The priest and nurse broke into a dismayed clamor.

  “Oh, please, kind sir,” Elspeth said, appearing dangerously near tears herself. “Ye mustn’t be too harsh on her. My mistress is quite delicate.”

  Austyn cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Her delicate mistress was presently beating at the brook with both fists, sending great gouts of water spraying into the air.

  “What she means to say,” the priest shot Austyn’s gauntleted fists a nervous look, “is that our lady’s constitution is such that she might not survive a beating; therefore, we implore you—”

  “Enough!” Austyn roared.

  They all recoiled, even Carey.

  “The only person I’m going to beat around here is the next one who dares accuse me of beating someone. Now go as I bid you.” He turned to Carey. “If either of them tries to turn back, put an arrow through them.”

  Carey and the nurse scrambled to obey him, driving their mounts up the steep slope toward the ridge. Only the priest hung back, shooting a pensive look over his shoulder. Austyn glowered after him. The man’s proprietary attitude toward his wife was beginning to gall his temper.

  Determining that her howls showed little sign of ceasing without intervention, Austyn drew off his boots and gauntlets, waded straight into the brook and squatted down a few feet away from her, resting his elbows on his knees. The cool water lapped at his hose.

  Holly had squinched her eyes shut and drew breath for a fresh howl when she sensed someone nearby. Not just any old someone, she realized, sniffing a wintry breath of mint through her clogged nose. Her husband.

  Her exhalation dwindled to a strangled hiccup as she peered through puffy eyelids at the curious sight of Sir Austyn of Gavenmore squatting placidly in the middle of a rushing brook.

  He smiled encouragingly at her. “Feel better, Ivy?”

  His unruffled composure insulted her beyond bearing. Her misery flamed to rage. “My name is Holly, you dolt! Holly! Are you so stupid you can’t remember your own wife’s name?”

  Too incensed to ponder the consequences, she hurled the contents of her hand, which happened to be a fat gobbet of mud, directly at his smug face.

  Holly was immediately surprised to realize that she did feel better. Immensely better. ’Twas as if she’d just shoved the crushing weight of a stone gargoyle off her chest. But her recovery came at a very inopportune moment. She might have muffled her giggle at the sight of her husband’s forbidding visage spattered with mud, but his confounded expression as he blinked the stuff from his eyes undid her entirely. She pointed at him, her sobs rising to shrieks of laughter.

  He erupted from the water, striding toward her with lethal intent. Although alarmed to realize a fifteen stone Welshman with murder glittering in his eyes was a more substantial threat than an imaginary gargoyle, Holly was as helpless to stop laughing as she’d been to stop crying.

  She skittered backward like a freshwater crab, fully expecting him to throttle her as she deserved.

  Instead, he swept her up into the cradle of his arms. Her weighted skirts streamed water and she was forced to coil her arms around his neck or risk plunging right back into the brook.

  Her shock grew as he sank down on a flat-topped rock on the bank, his implacable grip binding her to
his lap. She thought to wiggle away, terrified he would discover the sodden lumps of cloth padding her skirt, but quickly realized that squirming only increased such a risk. She had no choice but to relax against his chest, his lap a cozier perch than she cared to admit.

  In stoic silence, he retrieved a dry kerchief from his tunic and dipped it in the brook. Holly expected him to wipe the silt from his own brow, but instead he bathed her face with surprising tenderness. She closed her swollen eyes with an involuntary moan of pleasure, the cool water a heavenly ablution to her sun-scalded cheeks.

  When she opened them, Austyn was drawing a leafy herb from a small leather bag. He held the pinch of green to her lips.

  She drew back, eyeing his offering with a suspicion she didn’t bother to hide. “Is it poison?”

  His crooked smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Poison’s a bit subtle for the Gavenmore tastes.” He bit off a leaf of the herb, chewing with obvious relish. “Try it,” he challenged, brushing the stalk against her parted lips.

  Holly would have tried hemlock itself to put a halt to his disturbing teasing. She snapped off a leaf, barely missing his fingertips. As she chewed, a foreign tingling besieged her mouth. Foreign, yet hauntingly familiar. As familiar as the scent of this man’s breath on her throat. As familiar as the tickle of his mustache against her upper lip. As familiar as the taste of his kiss, the beguiling contrast of warm tongue and cool mint.

  Plunged into confusion by the memory, Holly dropped her gaze to his lips, wondering again what manner of face lay beneath the mask of his beard.

  “ ’Tis wintergreen. For purifying the breath and teeth.”

  His matter-of-fact words snapped her back to reality. She was not the same woman he had kissed in the garden. Her teeth were no longer the snowy steeds of Eugene’s ode, but a herd of mottled nags.